Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Public meeting in LA today.

See you tomorrow.

You guys can just go ahead and chat here, 'cause it isn't like I'm still bitter that y'all went to fifty comments the day I was in San Jose. I barely remember that.

Later:

This is the SECOND DAY THIS WEEK that I have been forced to wear professional clothes ALL DAY. Good people of the state of California: I love working for you, but you are not paying me enough for this. No fucking pockets.

27 Comments:

Wooo! This means we can talk about computers without interruptions! I'm particularly keen to hear about Justus' system that uses continuation. That sounds very w00ty to me. Been doing some web sites using continuations and they are pretty sweet, though you have to take care to handle bookmarks in a sensible way. So, Justus, spill the beans!

Unfortunately it is nothing terribly exciting. I work on an enterprise class virtualizing RAID controller that uses a fairly straightforward event driven architecture where you pass callbacks around. I'm one of the youngest people here so most of the main architects may have lots of storage experience but are essentially stuck in the 1960s when it comes to every other aspect of software design. They're really good at ensuring every last thing is cache aligned because we only want to take 83 instructions to service mainline I/Os so we can hit our 100,000 cache hits per second per controller performance targets. Not so good at coming up with maintainable, extensible, readable, understandable designs and data structures.

A coworker just (unofficially) implemented a slighter saner set of primitives based off of a variant of Duff's Device -- the same basic mechanism that Simon Tatham's coroutines and the protothreads library use -- to make it a little easier to write clean code. He rewrote the media error handling code to use these and I've rewritten the RAID disk sparing in the virtualization layer to use the same style.

The whole thing doesn't integrate perfectly into the existing so-called architecture but it's no worse than the current non-solution of trying to keep track of callbacks in random unused structure fields. ("Hey, no one is using these adjacent unsigned shorts so I'll just cast them to a void* and put my function pointer in there!")

Faslomatt: what kind of questions do you want the tool to answer? If you want to know which content is most likely to lead to a subscription you might try modelling the site as a Markov chain. Your blogger profile says you occupation is statistician, so you probably know more than I about this kind of stuff!

Admittedly I have never had occasion to purchase professional clothing for women -- at least not the kind of professional you are, at least -- but I am pretty certain that suit jackets for women have pockets just as suit jackets for men do. Are those not enough pocket for you? Or do you not wear suit jackets? Or what?

I hate pockets. Cargo pants are the surest proof of the existence of Satan the world has ever been provided.

Megan - you would lose that bet, since I assume by "purse" you mean any external bag type thing to hold stuff, including but not limited to purses, clutches, courier bags, handbags, totes, briefcases, and backpacks.

I have a half dozen "bags", ranging from a Ferragamo leather briefcase to a JIMI on a lanyard. But I rarely have a need for them; most of the time my pockets have a few bills and four cards -- driver's license, ATM, Visa, and health insurance. I've never felt a need to carry more than that on me.

A couple years ago I hiked the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu. (Something I highly recommend everyone do; seeing the sun rise over the mists of Machu Picchu is the single most beautiful thing I've ever seen.) The whole trail is in a Peruvian national park and you are required to hire porters to carry things like food, tents, and sleeping bag. There is also a maximum limit to how much each porter is allowed to carry. At the entrance to the park there is a small ranger station where they weigh each porter's stuff and verify that all the tourists have entry permits. While you're waiting around for them to do that most of the tourists have fun weighing their own backpacks to see how much they weigh. It is a three or four day hike and even though the porters are carrying pretty much everything of consequence most people still had pretty damn heavy backpacks. Mine was about eight pounds.

You seem like more of a luddite than I am so I'm surprised at your need for pockets.

According to CDEC, it is 52 degrees out right now, which makes my jeans, long sleeve T and fleece vest adequate. I greatly resent anything else, or accusations that we don't have winter. It is, for example, much too cold for a short sleeve T.

I don't mind using pockets, so long as they aren't on pants. But I also hate shirts with pockets so that doesn't leave me with many conventional pocket options. Generally I prefer to have my stuff in a bag if I am going carry more than cash and a driver's license.

The fact that you consider 52 degrees "not t-shirt weather" is the clearest sign that you don't have winter where you live. The last time it was 52 here most people were wearing t-shirts and a lot of teenagers were wearing shorts and sandals.

Tony Soprano:Y'know you have a nice body. You ought to make it work for you more. Russian Mistress:Oh, really? TS:Yeah, you reveal too much. RM:You don't want other men looking at me? TS:No, when you're not with me, you do what you want. But I'm sayin', maybe you could wear a nice businesslike outfit. I think I could get into that. RM:You want me to dress like a man?TS: No, no, you fuckin' whackadoo, I don't want you to dress like a man. I'm just sayin' maybe wear something a little more professional. You know, like you're in business. RM:Fuck you, tony, I'm no whore. TS:No, that's not what I mean. Not like you're in the whore business, forget it. C'mere. Is everybody in my life bananas or what? Get over here! RM:Go jerk off. Yeah, go jerk off.

My impression is that you're like the Russian mistress, except instead of revealing too much you wear baggy tee-shirts all the time. Maybe the bear state has forced you into mating opportunities you wouldn't otherwise have. :)

Can we go back to talking about computers now? My problem isn't analyzing the data (Markov chains are a great idea) but gathering it in the first place; 10GB+ a day makes the data center folks unhappy, and our proprietary systems don't put it in a very neat package, so we have to engineer something there, too.

- collect alternative data by embedding an invisible IMG or FRAME in each page which calls your data collection server. On the data collection server you can look at the Referer header to where the request came from.

For me, the keys and the cell phone go in the left front pocket; pocket knife, pen, usb flash drive in the right front; wallet in the back right. I put receipts in the back left, but they only stay there until the next time I do the budget.

I wear semi-professional clothes to work every day. It's not often I get to wear a suit, so I enjoy occasions when I do. If I had a job, though, where I could wear jeans and a t-shirt every day, I would.